Life on the outside is full of unpleasant surprises for longtime inmates.

A man had a gift for teaching people to beat the polygraph. Now he’s going to prison.

The story of “Madam Walker,” who built a thriving empire of hair products for black women.

For online advertisers, probably most of it. An investigation.

Websites and apps are designed for compulsion, even addiction. So why aren’t they regulated like drugs or casinos?

How the Caltech basketball team, losers of 310 straight conference games, figured out a formula for winning.

The complicated case of Michelle Kosilek, a murderer fighting for sexual reassignment surgery.

For centuries, a little town in Belgium has been treating the mentally ill. Why are its medieval methods so successful?

Searching for the mysterious tree kangaroo in one of the most remote places on Earth.

Is it time to end the mourning period for old media?

Nearly every American soldier injured in Iraq or Afghanistan is treated—for a few days at least—at a single hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

On the unlikely survival (for the second time) of Kamaishi, Japan.

A profile of the up-and-coming New York politician, who at the time was toying with a run for mayor.

The disappearance of a legendary scavenger could have dire consequences for a swelling human population.

At work with Jean-Claude Carrière, screenwriter of choice for an entire generation of top-flight directors.

I felt, in some substantive yet elusive way, that I had had a hand in killing my mother. And so the search for a bed became a search for sanctuary, which is to say that the search for a bed became the search for a place; and of course by place I mean space, the sort of approximate, indeterminate space one might refer to when one says to another person, "I need some space"; and the fact that space in this context generally consists of feelings did not prevent me from imagining that the space-considered, against all reason, as a viable location; namely, my bedroom-could be filled, pretty much perfectly, by a luxury queen-size bed draped in gray-and-white-striped, masculine-looking sheets, with maybe a slightly and appropriately feminine ruffled bed skirt stretched about the box spring (all from Bellora in SoHo).

The web has revolutionized communications and commerce, but what does it mean for art?

Three primary reasons: A desire for vengeance, the sanitization of executions and, ironically, the reliability of DNA evidence.

A prescient take on what the US invasion of Iraq would mean for both countries.

The case for why a cup of joe is about to become a luxury item.

An investigation into the events surrounding Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s May 2011 arrest for sexual assault.

How prison changed the mother and militant who was sentenced to 75 years for her role in a deadly 1981 Brinks truck heist.

The Mexican novelist and activist talks about the role that the US plays in the hemisphere, and a joint future for North and South America.

We need your memory and your imagination or ours shall never be complete. You need our memory to redeem your past, and our imagination to complete your future. We may be here on this hemisphere for a long time. Let us remember one another. Let us respect one another. Let us walk together outside the night of repression and hunger and intervention, even if for you the sun is at high noon and for us at a quarter to twelve.

On the perils and poisons of mining for gold in southeastern Peru.